From Hawkshead, Wordsworth took several good things with him. In book-learning, there was Latin enough to enable him to read the Roman poets with pleasure in after years; of mathematics, more than enough to start him on equality with the average of Cambridge freshmen; of Greek, I should suppose not much-at least we never hear of it afterwards. It was here that he began that intimacy with the English poets which he afterwards perfected; while for amusement he read the fictions of Fielding and Swift, of Cervantes and Le Sage. But neither at school nor in after life was he a devourer of books.

Of actual verse-making, his earliest attempts date from Hawkshead. A long copy of verses, written on the second centenary of the foundation of the school, was much admired, but he himself afterwards pronounced them but a 'tame imitation of Pope.' Some lines composed on his leaving school, with a few of which the edition of his works of 1857 opens, are more noticeable, as they, if not afterwards changed, contain a hint of his maturer self. But more important than any juvenile poems, or any skill of versemaking acquired at Hawkshead, were the materials for after thought there laid up, the colours laid deep into the groundwork of his being. In the 'Evening Walk,' composed partly at school, partly in college vacations, he notices how the boughs and leaves of the oak darken and come out when seen

against the sunset. 'I recollect distinctly,' he says nearly fifty years afterwards, 'the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the way between

Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances, which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could not have been at that time above fourteen years of age.' Not a bad resolution for fourteen! And he kept it. It would be hardly too much to say that there is not a single image in his whole works which he had not observed with his own eyes. And perhaps no poet since Homer has introduced into poetry, directly from nature, more facts and images which had not before been noted in books.

But more than any book-lore, more than any skill in verse-making, or definite thoughts about poetry, was the free, natural life he led at Hawkshead. It was there that he was smitten to the core with that love of nature which became the prime necessity of his being; not that he was a moody or peculiar boy, nursing his own fancies apart from his companions. So far from that, he was foremost in all schoolboy adventures, the sturdiest oar, the hardiest cragsman at the harrying of ravens' nests. Weeks and months, he tells us, passed in a round of school tumult. life could have been every way more unconstrained and `natural. But school tumult though there was, it was not in a made playground at cricket or rackets, but in haunts more fitted to form a poet-on the lakes and the hill-sides. Would that some poets,

No

who have since been born, had had such a boyhood, had walked, like Wordsworth, unmolested in the cool fields, not been stimulated at school by the fever of emulation and too early intellectuality, and then hurled prematurely against the life-wrecking problems of existence! Whatever stimulants Wordsworth had came from within, awakened only by the common sights and sounds of nature. All through his schooltime, he says that in pauses of the 'giddy bliss' he felt 'Gleams like the flashing of a shield, the earth And common face of nature spake to him

Rememberable things.'

And as time went on, and common school pursuits lost their novelty, these visitations grew deeper and more frequent. At nightfall, when a storm was coming on, he would stand in shelter of a rock, and hear

'Notes that are

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

Or make their dim abode in distant winds.'

At such times he was aware of a coming down upon him of the 'visionary power.' On summer mornings he would rise, before another human being was astir, and alone, from some jutting knoll, watch the first gleam of dawn kindle on the lake :—

'Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect of the mind.'

Is not this the germ of what afterwards became the 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality'? or rather, it is of hours like these that that Ode is the glorified remembrance.

In October 1787, at the age of eighteen, Wordsworth passed from Hawkshead School to St. John's College, Cambridge. College life, so important to those whose minds are mainly shaped by books and academic influences, produced on him but little impression, On men of strong inward bias the University often acts with a repulsive rather than a propelling force. Recoiling from the prescribed drill, they fall back all the more entirely on their native instincts. The stripling of the hills had not been trained for college competitions; he felt that he was not 'for that hour, and for that place.' The range of scholastic studies seemed to him narrow and timid. The college dons inspired him with no reverence, their inner heart seemed trivial; they were poor representatives of the Bacons, Barrows, Newtons of the old time. As for college honours, he thought them dearly purchased at the price of the evil rivalries and narrow standard of excellence, which they fostered in the eager few who entered the lists. Altogether, he had led too free and independent a life to put on the fetters which college contests and academic etiquette exacted. No doubt he was a self-sufficient, presumptuous youth, so to judge of men and things in so famous a University. Such at least he must have appeared to college authorities; very disappointing too he must have been to friends at home. They had sent him thither, with no little trouble, not to set himself up in opposition to authority, but to work hard, and by working to make his livelihood. And perhaps home friends and col

lege tutors were not altogether wrong in their opinion of him, if we are to judge of men not wholly by after results. Wordsworth at this time may probably enough have been a headstrong, disagreeably independent lad. Only there were latent in him other qualities of a rarer kind, which in time justified him in taking his own line.

When he arrived in Cambridge, a northern villager, he tells us that there were other poor, simple schoolboys from the north, now Cambridge men, ready to welcome him, and introduce him to the ways of the place. So, leaving to others the competitive race, he let himself, in the company of these, drop quietly down the stream of the usual undergraduate jollities:

'If a throng were near,

That way I leaned by nature; for my heart
Was social, and loved idleness and joy.'

It sounds strange to read in the pompous blank verse of 'The Prelude,' how, while still a freshman, he turned dandy, wore hose of silk, and powdered hair. And again, how in a friend's room in Christ College, once occupied by Milton, he toasted the memory of the abstemious Puritan till the fumes of wine took his brain-the first and last time that the future water-drinker experienced that sensation. During the earlier part of his college course he did just as others did, lounged and sauntered, boated and rode, enjoyed wines and supper-parties, 'days of mirth and nights of revelry;' yet kept clear of vicious excess.

When the first novelty of college life was over, he